


freezeframe

by dragonlisette



Category: Phandom/The Fantastic Foursome (YouTube RPF)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fluff, M/M, Singapore 2017
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-18
Updated: 2017-07-18
Packaged: 2018-12-03 20:24:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,385
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539794
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dragonlisette/pseuds/dragonlisette
Summary: “Absolutely,” Phil said, turning back to his own phone and then looking up at Dan again, suddenly struck by the motion and vivacity in him, by the rise and fall of his chest and the absent scuffing of his foot. Give the internet all the saucy mirror selfies they wanted, give them every single freezeframe. They’d never get Dan.





	freezeframe

The plane was dark, the constant rumble and hum of the engine under the floor fading away into a kind of stillness. Phil didn’t know where they were, had turned off the monitor so he didn’t have to look at the little plane blinking across Europe and the countdown of all the endless hours left in the flight. They were five hours in, maybe? Something like that. They’d watched two movies and then Dan had started expressing some opinion about them and dozed off halfway through it, which was fair. He needed the sleep. They both did.

They were, as ever, too tall for the seats and the whole thing was mostly just uncomfortable, but planes were one of the things they’d gotten reasonably good at. There was a subtle little dance to it, to putting the armrest up as soon as the lights turned off, to piling the complimentary blankets up in just the right way, all just to hold hands between the seats and pretend that this cabin full of businesspeople was empty. It was a luxury, really, the risk outweighed by how nice it was to do this thing that they never bothered doing when they were alone and never could do when they weren’t. In sleep, Dan’s hand was warm and still and Phil never wanted to let go or look away.

It wasn’t that he was any kind of attractive, head tipped back in an animal-print neck pillow, mouth open a little, legs bundled up between the seats. It was that it was Dan, and that this flight was bound for Singapore, and the most they had to worry about for the next bit was clicking publish on some videos and taking some selfies. Phil understood, if he stopped to think about it, that there was always, always some level of low-burn stress to their lives. They’d cased the plane for teenage girls. Every moment of their vacation they spent outside the hotel room was the potential property of anyone who spotted them. Any outfit they wore would inevitably get thousands upon thousands of views and shares. It was just that sometimes they made the choice to set the stress aside.

(That had been a packing conversation, because for once in their lives packing for a convention had been easier than all the other kinds of packing they’d been doing. Dan had been sitting cross-legged on the floor of his room, surrounded by boxes, emptying the thin layer of clothes left in his dresser into his suitcase.

“I’m taking those ripped jeans,” he’d said, in a voice that brooked no argument, except it was Dan and he wanted to talk about it.

“Okay,” Phil’d said, curled up on the end of Dan’s bed. They’d been sleeping there the past couple of nights. Phil had already packed his sheets.

“I was thinking Sydney. Shock value.”

“Okay,” Phil’d said again, and yawned. Dan had shot him a Look-with-a-capital-L, and he’d laughed a little. “Sorry. ‘m asleep. Sydney. No consequences.”

“How d’you mean?” Dan had asked, hauling himself up to search for various charger cords and important documents.

“You’re not at home. It’s not the same. People aren’t looking at you the same way. That’s why you’re doing it in Australia, isn’t it?”

“Probably,” Dan had said, because they’d had ninety-five conversations about motivations and appearances and the public eye just in the time since they’d started the search for the new place, and the unthinkingly honest Dan had started turning up with a little more frequency. “Budge.”

Phil hadn’t budged, so Dan had budged him, shoving him over and tucking himself into the atoll made by the curve of Phil’s limbs.

“You’re not done packing,” Phil had said, with a touch of force, because the taxi was coming in less than two hours and he wasn’t going to breathe until Dan had zipped his suitcase. And then he’d felt Dan’s fingers slipping into his hair and he’d given up the fight a little.

“I will be,” Dan had said, rubbing at the shorter patch behind Phil’s ear. “How do you feel  about not worrying quite so much this trip?”

“I feel like the taxi’s going to be here sooner than you think it is.”

“I meant, like. Pictures.”

“Oh.” Phil had considered that. “You mean – ”

“I mean we’re not at home. It’s not the same. We’re gonna be – outside, going to places, seeing cool aesthetic things, and I want to take pictures and I want to not worry about those pictures or whether we’re walking too close in the airport and – ”

“I get it,” Phil had said, and breathed in the sensation of having him so close and pushed him away. “Pack.”

“I want to post them,” Dan’d said, sliding off the bed, tall and messy-haired and holding a handful of Macbook cable.

“I get it.”)

And now they were on the plane, and Dan’s head had tipped a little more sideways, and Phil desperately wanted to lean into the warm line of his side and go to sleep against him and wake up in the fresh new world of Singapore. The businesspeople around them weren’t looking. Most of them were doing serious laptop work like they hadn’t planned and filmed and edited half a dozen videos in advance all while moving house. Beside him, Dan made a tiny sleepy noise and wiggled his fingers in Phil’s grip, and Phil breathed out through his teeth and curled into the warm scent of his cologne, closed his eyes and slept.

* * *

He took a total of ninety-seven pictures in the aquarium. There were jellyfish and stingrays and reflections of water off the floor and Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan, Dan. In the hotel, Dan sprawled across the expensive duvet in his boxers, pink and curly and damp from the shower, and texted himself all the best ones.

“No ‘thank you’?” Phil asked, jetlagged and deprived of his phone and a little miffed that Dan kept implying that Phil was the bad photographer out of the two of them. Dan blinked up at him and smiled, and Phil had never learned how to be angry in the face of Dan looking fond.

“They’re good,” Dan said, because he certainly wasn’t going to thank Phil now he’d been called on it.

“Good for me, I get it.”

“Nah,” Dan said, and rolled onto his back, scrolling through the open iMessage conversation, the dozen snapshots of tiny moments. “Just good.”

* * *

The mirror selfie took twenty-five minutes. Phil timed it. It wasn’t like he had anything better to do, because he wasn’t allowed to cross the dressing room lest his leg show up in the corner of the best one or something, so mostly he sat against the wall and screwed around on his phone because yes, Dan was unbelievably good-looking, but he was always unbelievably good-looking, and Phil could only take so much of watching him pout into a mirror.

“We’re going to be late,” he told the back of Dan’s head.

“We won’t be,” he said absently, bent over filters. He held out the phone with the drafted post. “Look at – look, is the contrast too high, d’you think?”

“It was perfect three hours ago,” Phil said, and meant twenty-four minutes and forty-three seconds. “Just post the thing.”

“You just don’t want the internet to see my knees,” Dan said, and went to adjust more sliders.

“Absolutely,” Phil said, turning back to his own phone and then looking up at Dan again, suddenly struck by the motion and vivacity in him, by the rise and fall of his chest and the absent scuffing of his foot. Give the internet all the saucy mirror selfies they wanted, give them every single freezeframe. They’d never get Dan.

* * *

The hop to Melbourne was short, and Phil was grateful for it, both because he was sick of planes and because their knees were literally pressed up against the seats in front. Dan made one discouraged-sounding comment about _tall-ism, honestly_ and then went to sleep, leaving Phil to sigh a little and reach over him to slide the window shade down.

“You could have talked to me for like, five minutes,” he told Dan’s scrunched-up form, and instead played match-three games and ran over all his mental to-do lists, the Melbourne to-do list and the Singapore-again to-do list and the moving to-do list and the YouTube to-do lists. When he ran out of plays, he watched Dan sleep again, propped against the window now with his sleeves pulled down over his hands, hiding his fingertips, the glitter.

(The nail polish had been that morning. “Wake up,” Dan had said, sitting cross-legged by Phil’s head and prodding each freckle on his back in turn. “Wake up. Look. What do you think?”

“What?” Phil had said, falling slowly into consciousness and feeling dizzy. He’d groped for glasses that weren’t on the nightstand where he’d left them, been momentarily disconcerted, and then become aware that Dan had already grabbed them and was trying to tuck them clumsily over his nose. He’d batted Dan’s hand away and squinted at his too-close face, seen the anxious lip-bite. “Dan?”

“ _Look_ ,” he’d said, holding his hand two inches from Phil’s face. “What do you think?”

“Glittery,” Phil had said, and thought he deserved praise for that level of mental functioning.

“I did edgy yesterday,” Dan’d said, too casual. “So I one-eightied, because why not. Pastel, like, you know, give the people what they want and I’ve got the Gatorland hat, so – ”

“ ‘s great, Dan,” Phil had said, and he’d gotten as far as sliding his glasses back off his nose and burying his face in the pillow before Dan had informed him that his alarm had gone off thirteen minutes previously.

As for the outfit being a why-not, it was a lie, as things usually were when Dan said them too casually. They didn’t really dress on whims, not when half their clothes were boxed in London. Dan had packed the glittery nail polish and he’d packed the rhinestone cap and he’d packed the ripped jeans. He’d planned it all. He was taking risks in a way that he needed and that terrified him, intoxicated on the freedom to do it and on being away from home and on changing and reorienting his life – they’d just signed a new lease, they’d committed, they were getting a fresh start and rooms that weren’t full of eyes – anyway, he’d planned it, and Phil knew and he knew why, and that made his heart swell a little somehow. In the shower, trying to boil himself awake with scalding water, Phil had considered his own suitcase. He’d packed, as ever, mostly things that were tried-and-true, but maybe he ought to be taking a leaf out of Dan’s book and wearing something he’d never worn before. Tomorrow on stage. That butterfly shirt.

He’d left the bathroom to find Dan sitting on the end of the bed, scowling at his Twitter feed. “I don’t know what’s going on,” Dan had said without looking up. “Yet again I miss all the UK news because we’re in the wrong fucking time zone.”

“Homesick,” Phil had said wisely, and had then accepted the scowl when Dan had turned it on him.)

Now, on the plane, Phil considered Dan’s face and decided that sleeping through another flight wasn’t allowed. He reached out and shook Dan’s arm until he blinked his way awake.

“What?” Dan asked, confused, rubbing at his face with the heels of his hands. “We landing?”

“I wanted to talk to you,” Phil said, suddenly caught a little off-guard, a little self-conscious.

“I was asleep, y’know,” Dan said, pressing his fingers into his eyes and dropping his hands back into his lap. “You’ve got the whole rest of your life to talk to me.” And then there was silence, and a smile pulling at the corner of Phil’s mouth as he tried to work out what to say, and Dan running the tape back in his head and widening his eyes. “I mean – shit.”

“I’m just trying to take full advantage of my opportunity,” Phil said, and bumped their knees together because the plane was full and brightly lit.

* * *

Melbourne back to Singapore, and the hotel clerk that Phil sort of flirted with, and an elevator trip up sixty-five floors that he was practically asleep at the end of, leaning on his suitcase and feeling the world flicker like a guttering candle flame. He followed Dan’s shoes down the hall and dozed off again for the ten seconds it took Dan to work the keycard.

“You need to start sleeping on planes,” Dan said, faraway and fond, pushing him into the room. Phil wasn’t sure if he responded or not. Probably not. He woke up later, flopped on the bed with his shoes and jacket gone, Dan sitting next to him on his laptop, legs stretched out in front of him.

“Time’s it?” he asked, raspy, and Dan looked down at him, smoothed a hand over his hair. The light was soft and yellowy, shades drawn on their tiny vignette, and Phil very much wanted to press his face into Dan’s hip and fall asleep again.

“You weren’t out more’n an hour. I took pictures, though.” He fumbled on the nightstand for his phone and slid it into Phil’s hand, watching as Phil flipped with sleep-clumsy fingers through the selfies Dan had taken, high angles that captured the long-suffering face Dan was pulling in the foreground and Phil collapsed behind him.

“Did you post these?” Phil asked, slow and unsure. He wouldn’t. Not without asking. Not something like this.

“Fuck no,” he said, and Phil exhaled just a little, handing the phone back. Dan glanced through them again himself, brow furrowed. “I just – I didn’t want you to miss it, how stupid you looked asleep like that. I wanted to wake you up and show you, but, you know.” He touched Phil’s hair again, light, tucking a stray piece of fringe back into place with nervous fingers. “I mean. You didn’t look stupid. You were cute and I wanted to keep it. You didn’t think – without asking – ”

“No,” Phil said, and wondered when exactly that kind of picture had started seeming like something that Dan might post. “Just. ‘m tired. And we’ve been posting a lot of pictures.” He considered saying more, something sappy maybe, because the fact that Dan had found a perfectly ordinary moment valuable enough to keep for him to look at had lit something warm in his chest, but he decided against it, settled a little closer into the pillows and closed his eyes.

“Contacts,” Dan said, because he was the worst person in the world. “You’ll regret it if you don’t.”

“Regret _you,_ ” Phil said, rolling away. “Never speaking to you again.”

* * *

The gardens were sprawling, glittering, sweet-smelling, beautiful. They played Mozart over the light show and Dan started crying, fingers over his mouth and big damp eyes in the colorful dimness. Phil wanted to reach out and take his hand, a lovely impossibility, so instead he brushed against Dan’s elbow and said, “gardens by the _bae_ ,” quiet in his ear. Dan laughed wetly, threw a hand back to catch his knuckles along Phil’s ribs.

“Fuck you, it’s gorgeous and I’m having a moment and you go and – ”

The couple who wanted Dan to photograph them was touristy, privileged, snippy. Phil sat back on the cool concrete and watched Dan deal with angles and focus, all professionalism despite his shorts and the sheen of humidity in his hair. When they were gone, Dan stepped back to sit beside him, eyebrows up in a silent communiqué.

“I mean,” Phil said after a minute, after the couple had certainly moved out of earshot, “you did take twenty-five minutes on that selfie back in Sydney.”

Dan laughed, leaned back on his hands with his shoulder so close and so warm. “That’s different. They were just like, ooh if the picture’s not perfectly framed, we didn’t actually have a perfect moment and that’s our holiday ruined.”

“Yeah,” Phil said, and didn’t say that they’d been taking pictures too, fighting to keep the perfect moments from fleeing. They’d spent far too long not taking pictures, worried about who might see. It was easier now.

Dan was looking at him thoughtfully. “I mean – it’s different, though, isn’t it? With us?”

Phil smiled a little, because it was less about the quality of the pictures and more about remembering the tiny frozen moments. “Yeah. It’s different.”

* * *

Dan talked a little too much about the light show in the taxi back to the hotel, bubbling over about the music and the artistry, but that was okay. It was nice to travel with someone who got too invested in the things they were seeing.

(The night zoo, Singapore the first time around, and Dan insisting upon seeing every animal in the place. They’d both been tired from the long, long day and from running into too many people who recognized them, and Dan had kept dragging them on past exhibit after exhibit.

“This one has a bad face,” Phil had said, staring at some grumpy-looking mammal, fast asleep and oblivious to the criticism.

Dan had laughed. “AmazingPhil doesn’t like an animal, call the press, call the police.”

“I’d like it better if it weren’t the ninety-fifth animal we’d seen tonight.” He wasn’t trying to be cross, but they’d seen the best ones and they ought to be done by now, but instead they were wandering through the back of this zoo and couldn’t even stand too close because every single employee in this place had gasped at the sight of their faces.

“We can – oh my God, Phil, what the fuck is a badger-pig?”

They’d stood and looked at it together, and after ten seconds they’d both started laughing and Phil’d dropped his head onto Dan’s shoulder for the briefest of seconds. “Okay. Okay, I’m done.”

“We wouldn’t have seen that stupid badger-pig if I hadn’t wanted to see everything,” Dan had said on the way back to the entrance, halfway through a long bit about British imperialism.

“I know,” Phil had said, and really he didn’t mind Dan’s refusal to leave a place or a topic or an obsession until he’d absorbed everything about it. It was quintessential Dan. It was who he was.)

He didn’t mind Dan’s talking now, either, listening vaguely and touching his hand in the dark backseat, watching the neon glow of the streets whirr by outside the window. There was really no one he’d rather be bored by.

* * *

The room was crowded, but Dan stood in his own little world, hands loose at his sides, ignoring everyone around them in favor of laughing at Phil.

“The ultimate test, Phil, d’you think you can manage?”

“Shut up,” Phil said, watching the wave crash along the walls, watching people try to get the same shot he was about to attempt, watching a child run along to grasp at the seafoam. “Stand still.”

Dan froze, a stupid dramatic middle-distance stare, and the wave swirled by and Phil pressed the shutter, and then Dan was dropping the pose and asking if he’d gotten it, and Phil felt like the wave had crashed down on his own head. Hundreds of thousands of people would get the single frozen moment of Dan in the blue light, but only he got the moment after, Dan’s face turned toward him, open and smiling and cocking to the side in a question.

“Well?”

“Yeah, I – yeah,” Phil said, looking down. The picture was good. It didn’t look quite like Dan, but it was good. The real Dan, the moving breathing heartbeat Dan, was coming up beside him, taking the phone out of his hand.

“You actually did, wow,” he said, and they stood angled toward each other, heads down over the phone, and soon they would be boarding a plane home, a long, painful daytime flight to end this swirl of moments. A set of moments in time, a patchwork collage on Instagram, but it wasn’t really that. Not a frozen frame, not a butterfly on a pinboard, but the whole stack of raw footage and the memory of Dan’s warmth at his shoulder.

**Author's Note:**

> find me on tumblr at cityofphanchester!


End file.
